An enterprise application is a set of workloads (e.g., computing, networking, and storage) that is generally distributed across various endpoints of a network and the relationships (e.g., connectivity, dependencies, network and security policies, etc.) between the workloads. A typical application may include a presentation tier, an application tier, and a data tier. The presentation tier may depend on the application tier and authentication services, and the application tier may depend on the web tier and external network services (e.g., a travel reservation system, an ordering tool, a billing tool, etc.). These tiers may further depend on firewall, load balancing, wide area network (WAN) acceleration, and other network services. An enterprise can include hundreds or thousands of applications of similar and different architectures.
A thorough understanding of applications running in a network and their dependencies can be critical for administrative tasks such as troubleshooting system and network failures, asset management (e.g., capacity planning, consolidation, migration, and continuity planning), and anomaly detection. Despite the complexities of the interrelationships among workloads, traditional approaches for assessing applications and applications dependencies are often limited to manual processes that are customized for a particular enterprise and require highly expert human operators with vast knowledge of that enterprise's network.